Manchester Cathredral Baptizes New Age Quackery

From the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" department comes this report via Virtue Online of a New Age spirituality conference to be held at Manchester Cathedral (Anglican) in England.

Manchester Cathedral is to host a 'new age' festival featuring tarot card readers, crystal healers and 'dream interpretation'.

Local Anglican leaders have agreed to throw open the doors of the historic cathedral in a bid to embrace alternative forms of Christianity.

Fortune tellers, meditation experts and traditional healers will fill the pews during the day-long festival in May. The Bishop of Manchester, Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, said he wanted to celebrate 'all forms of spirituality'.

The Spirit of Life festival on May 2 will also feature stalls and workshops on angels, prayer bead-making and massage.

Fire-breathing vicar Rev Andy Salmon, of Sacred Trinity Church and St Philip with St Stephen in Salford, will also perform.

Bishop Nigel said the unconventional activities were not incompatible with Christian belief.

He said: "The event is a chance to discover and explore old and new Christian spiritual traditions from living in a community to praying with icons, from healing to bead-making, from Franciscan spirituality to contemporary music and movement.

"Practitioners from all over the country will be on hand to offer their experience of how God speaks to us today through the cultural language and practices so common in mind, body, spirit fairs."

Wonderful: Anglican bishops promoting Tarot cards and crystal in church. This sounds like something straight out of an end-times novel about the coming of the Anti-Christ. It makes the job of those who would parody the Church of England harder and harder. You really need a lot of imagination to exaggerate the insanity that passes for normal these days in the Anglican Church.